F. LAPLANCHE, Scientific rationalism and biblical interpretations in the 17th c., RThPh 2001/III, p. 227-245.
The development of astronomy in the 16th and 17th centuries modified biblical interpretation. In passages where a literal interpretation would have gone against proven scientific truth, the difficulty was circumvented by appealing to “intuitive appearances”. Next, the explanation took temporal distances into account: the Bible reflects the cosmology of its times. Finally, once the “physical” aspect had been looked after, this recourse to history was also applied, by Richard Simon and especially by Spinoza, to narrative form and biblical theology.